Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is a web services protocol for aggregating content and interactive web applications from remote sources. WSRP is a key standard that underlies federated portals. Essentially, WSRP allows remote, distributed portlets to be brought together at runtime into a unified portal page.
Web Services for Remote Portlets provide both application and presentation logic. This is different from standard web services, or data-oriented web services, which contain business logic but lack presentation logic and thus require that every client implement that logic on its own.
While the data-oriented approach works well in many implementations, it is not well suited for dynamically integrating business applications. For example, to integrate an order status web service into a commerce portal, one would need to write code to display the results of the status services into the portal. Using WSRP, with the presentation logic included in the web service, one can achieve the aggregation of applications and services dynamically. One no longer needs to develop the presentation logic in order to do the integration; one can simply request the order status service to show up as a portlet inside the commerce portal at a predetermined location.